


never tell me the odds

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: EGREGIOUS SAP, F/M, fixit fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 06:02:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18404588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: “I tried Star Wars," he says, adjusting the phone under his neck, "and it was way underwhelming.”A shaky breath from her end. “Well, where did you start?”“What do you mean?”“Where did you start watching?”“Uh, at the beginning?”“There’s your problem,” she says.





	never tell me the odds

**Author's Note:**

> ALL THANKS TO K FOR TELLING ME HOW A ROBOT WOULD KISS and for being v patient with my in hindsight ridiculous fear that Hera was going to die and brash confidence that Doug would be totally fine

 

  
“And Hera. Hera...” He laughs a little, breathless. No more jokes, he thinks, no more bullshit, just--the impossibility of what he has to say in the time he has to say it. “Hera, I--”

*

Apparently Doug Eiffel 1.0 underwent some kind of dangerous overexposure to cryo storage, and they’re not sure if his system is ready for another dose, so they’ve decided to forgo time in cold storage altogether. The AI claims the Urania is fast enough to get them home to Earth before they run out of food--just three months in the black, assuming nothing goes wrong, which he’s beginning to suspect happens to these people a lot.  
  
In the meantime, Doug does his best to stay out of everyone’s way. It’s not like he remembers anything about being a Communications Officer, or anything else to do with spaceships (neither did Eiffel, Jacobi assures him), so--he’s pretty much useless as a crew member. And he doesn’t remember anything about….well, anything, but specifically about the relationships he has with these people, and it’s exhausting to talk to people who get hollow-faced and funereal whenever he makes one wrong conversational step.

He spends a lot of time listening to Officer Eiffel’s personal logs. They’re borderline incomprehensible--half the time he feels like he needs a translator just to figure out the content, but after the first few times he asks Hera to explain he kind of picks up on the fact that maybe he shouldn’t do that. She’s perfectly nice about it, just….increasingly clipped. So apparently his relationship with the autopilot is also complicated, and it’s not like he can ask anyone else to clarify. Hera doesn’t turn off, and she doesn’t have any blindspots. He’s asked.  
  
It would be better if he _liked_ Officer Eiffel. But the man on the recordings is--glib, and careless, and obnoxious, and parodically selfish. Everyone on the crew seems to like him, but--he can’t figure out why.  
  
Even less so when Renée takes him aside a week in to quietly explain why it’s a bad idea for him to have a drink with Jacobi.

So: Officer Doug Eiffel was glib, obnoxious, selfish, careless, kind of moronic, and also a drunk who practically killed his daughter. Great to know what he’s heading home to.

The more Doug learns about who he used to be, the less he wants to...keep being that person, honestly.  
  
Saying all of that out loud is pretty cathartic, but it has….unexpected consequences.  
  
“Sooo...you and Hera were close,” Jacobi says, as the five of them huddle together in the showers, the only room that _hasn’t_ been abruptly vented of oxygen. The lights are flickering on and off, an alarm is blaring in the corridor outside, and Renée is typing something into the wall panel, murmuring calming things as she does so, like the AI actually needs to be talked through her panic attack. Jacobi gives Doug a meaningful look.  
  
“Jacobi,” Lovelace says warningly, and Jacobi shrugs.  
  
“What? Like he doesn’t have a right to know?”

“A right to know what?” Doug says.  
  
“I mean, I’d hope everything,” Miranda says, clutching her knees. Doug likes Miranda, although her eyes still kind of creep him out. It helps that Miranda’s in the same boat, although nobody’s grieving the original Dr. Pryce. He’s not sure if that makes it easier or harder for her. “It’s hard to be accountable for your actions if you’re being kept in the dark about what they were.”  
  
“Doug, you did nothing wrong,” Renée says with exaggerated calm from her position by the wall panel, not turning around. “Nothing to be accountable for.”  
  
“Obviously I did something wrong,” Doug says, and gestures uselessly at--everything. “Otherwise we would have….air.”

“It’s not like it’s a huge secret,” Jacobi says, rolling his eyes.  
  
Lovelace has this scary ability to get more threatening without raising her voice. Hell, she’s practically whispering now. “ _Jacobi._ Are you really going to say something that might upset Hera?” She levels a look in Jacobi’s direction that also functions as a gesture at everything. “Right now?”  
  
Jacobi blows out a sigh like a capitulation, and Doug feels a familiar pit open up in his stomach. So: no more information, just another minefield. “Okay, I get it, no...disrespect to Officer Eiffel’s memory,” Doug says, shifting uncomfortably. “Message received.”  
  
“You have to process your feelings, Doug,” Miranda says, frowning. “How else are we supposed to get through this?”  
  
“Sure,” Jacobi says, not looking away from Lovelace. “Just process them quietly. Internally. In a diary, maybe. The captain’ll get you a ballpoint pen.”  
  
“Hera’s going through a difficult time,” Lovelace says steadily. “We all are. It’s not her fault that she can’t choose to stop listening to you, and she can’t help being built on a bigger scale than we are.” Her voice sharpens almost imperceptibly, and she’s plainly directing the last part to Hera. “Like _we_ can’t help being built on a smaller scale. So she’s going to get it under control. _Very soon_.”

Renée’s murmur gets a little louder. “Whenever you’re ready,” she says, glaring at Lovelace. “We’re fine.”  
  
The lights flicker again, and then stabilize. There’s a pneumatic hiss, and the alarm finally stops.  
  
“Sorry,” Hera says. She glitches a little on the word. “Sorry about that. All systems are returned to normal. You can leave the showers now.”  
  
The doors slide open, revealing a perfectly normal corridor.  
  
“The question we haven’t asked,” Miranda says, twisting a piece of hair behind her ear, “is how do we stop this from happening again? Is there any way we can, I don’t know, _help_ Hera calm down? Or keep her from getting upset in the first place?”  
  
Dead silence.  
  
“Miranda,” Lovelace says, dropping a hand on her shoulder, “Let’s have a quick chat.” The two of them walk out of the bathroom, Miranda uncertain, Lovelace grim.  
  
Jacobi gives him a friendly grimace, then leaves too.  
  
It’s just him and Renée. She gives him an expectant look.  
  
He doesn’t--oh. It’s not just him and Renée.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he says awkwardly, staring up at the ceiling. “I know this is--hard for you.”  
  
“I’m sorry too,” Hera says, and she sounds very tired. “It won’t happen again.”  
  
*  
  
Two months in, and he notices a pattern in the recordings. Officer Eiffel calls his coworkers a lot of things, and Doug doesn’t understand most of them--but Hera’s the only one he calls “darling” and “baby”. “Sweetheart”, once or twice. There’s nothing else, but--there’s a tone, and he might not know himself but he still has his implicit memory: the thing that allows him to do stuff by rote. He knows the state capitals, he knows who the President is, he knows how to wash and count and feed himself. He just doesn’t have access to his autobiographical memory--the things that happened to him. He thinks he still recognizes that tone in his own voice, even if he doesn’t know when he might have used it before.  
  
It’s late when he switches off the latest recording--everyone else is asleep, he thinks.  
  
Except--  
  
“Hera,” he says. “Are you there?”  
  
A sigh. “I’m here, Eiffel.” He’s tried to get her to call him Doug--it feels important, having some kind of line he can draw between who he was now and who he was then, and he’s definitely not an officer anymore--but her formality protocols won’t allow it.  
  
“Can I ask--?” he hesitates. He’s not sure what he wants to ask. How would that even work? It’s not like she has a body. Did Officer Eiffel--have a weird unrequited crush? _Was_ it unrequited? What does he--owe her? If anything?  
  
“You can ask me anything.” A short pause, and then she adds: “No promises on answers, though.”  
  
He tries to put together the question, fails, and then sighs. “Can I ask--why you liked him?”  
  
A very long pause, this time.  
  
“He was my best friend,” she says finally.  
  
“That doesn’t really answer my question,” Doug says, when it seems like maybe she’s done.  
  
“Yeah,” Hera says. “It kind of does.”  
  
It sounds like an ending.  
  
As he’s falling asleep it occurs to him that he’s resentful, and that’s not fair. He doesn’t even know what he’s missing.

*  
  
When they finally make it to Earth, there’s honestly a lot of paperwork to do. After a bunch of heated discussion on the trip over, they decide to make their return as public as possible: no getting disappeared into a government lab after finally breaking free of Pryce and Cutter. Luckily, Renée has a contact at the New York Times.  
  
They’re on a global livestream for three days before they finally make land, about thirty miles off the coast of Texas. Renée stresses the fact of Hera’s personhood wherever possible in front of the cameras; and when they are picked up by the Navy, she makes being Hera’s advocate her priority, not letting a piece of Hera’s hardware out of her sight.  
  
This is complicated by the fact that the Urania is being removed to DC pretty much immediately, because the Pentagon is pretty damn interested in the story Renée’s been selling to the public. The rest of them have the choice of going to DC for processing or taking the shorter flight up to Houston.  
  
“I’m still looking out for both of you,” she tells Doug and Miranda seriously. “You’re still my responsibility, and I’m going to make sure you’re alright. But I’m not letting anyone alone with Hera that she doesn’t approve first, so it looks like I’m going to DC.”  
  
“She’s vulnerable right now,” Miranda says, brow furrowed. “You’re right--you should….take care of her.”  
  
“That sounds like a good plan, Renée,” Doug says, and she gives him a by now familiar pained smile.

Doug’s the only one to pick Houston. He’s read and re-read his own personnel file a hundred times by now: he knows that there’s a woman and a girl he has to see somewhere in Houston. If they’ll let him.  
  
So: lots of paperwork, lots of interviews by excited scientists and serious military officials, punctuated regularly by visits with his legal team, because yeah, he has a legal team. Every so often he gets a disorienting glimpse of a journalist shouting for his attention, but nobody forces him to get back in front of a camera. Good thing, since he has no idea what he’d say.  
  
It’s honestly kind of a blur.  
  
He doesn’t see anyone from the Urania for about a month, although he does get daily phone calls from Renée, updating him on everyone else: Goddard Futuristics is suing them, and they’re also suing Goddard Futuristics, and also the FBI is investigating Goddard Futuristics for treason and the UN is investigating them for crimes against humanity. It’s a big legal farce, but at least nobody in power appears to be seriously entertaining the idea of throwing the six of them in jail, so that’s something. The public interest is helping things move along speedily. Renée is the public face of the story, spending a lot of time in front of the cameras, looking extremely stalwart and trustworthy. That’s thanks to the husband he didn’t know about, Doug guesses. She seems horrifically busy, even more so than when she was running a spaceship.  
  
“You know, you can always email, if it’s easier,” he tells her once. His lawyer hooked him up with a laptop, and he’s set up a gmail account and everything. He’s sent exactly one email so far, and he’s still waiting for a response.  
  
She pauses like he’s just said something insensitive. He winces. “It’s….reassuring to hear your voice,” she says, deliberately understated. “You know, I’ve talked to you almost every day for the last two years? I’d rather call, if it’s okay with you.”  
  
“Yeah,” he says, swallowing a lump in his throat he can’t totally justify. “Yeah, that’s fine.”  
  
They put him up in a nice hotel. He finds gravity hard to adjust to: implicit memory working against him, again. He doesn’t remember life before he lived on a spaceship, so obviously he misses it, even if he is happy having regular access to coffee and pizza. Renée talks him through setting up Netflix on his laptop, and he tries to watch Star Wars. He doesn’t totally get the appeal.  
  
He goes to therapy every few days and talks with a very nice woman about all the things he doesn’t remember: the Hephaestus, and aliens, and the traumatized daughter, and the ex-girlfriend who hasn’t responded to his email even though his lawyer says it’s definitely her current address, and Doug Eiffel.  
  
It’s pretty disheartening.  
  
“Hey,” Renée says one day. “You want to talk to Hera? The AI advocate finally got her transferred out of the Urania. David and I are staying with her until the emancipation hearing’s over.” Hera is also apparently suing Goddard Futuristics for ownership of herself. CNN says the suit’s going well.  
  
“She can do that?” Doug asks, startled.  
  
“She’s one of the most advanced AI systems in the world,” Renée says dryly. “She can use a phone.”

“Sure,” Doug says. “Yeah, okay. Put her on.”  
  
There’s a brief crackle, and then Renée says: “Okay, I’m signing off.”  
  
“Hi Doug,” Hera says, and Doug realizes abruptly that he missed her. Misses her. He’s been missing her for weeks.  
  
“Hey Hera,” he says. “Wow, you called me Doug.”  
  
“Yeah. They’re letting me adjust my settings manually now. Just small things for now, but….it’s a good step forward.”  
  
“Wow,” he says again, inane. “Congratulations.”

“How...have you….been?” she asks, and it’s kind of comforting that she’s just as awkward about this as he is, honestly.  
  
“Fine,” he says. “Kind of bored, to be honest. Netflix isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“Yeah, I tried Star Wars and it was way underwhelming.”  
  
A shaky breath. “Well, where did you start?”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“Where did you start watching?”  
  
“Uh, at the beginning?”  
  
“There’s your problem,” she says, and he doesn’t know why it sounds like she’s smiling, because he knows she doesn’t have a mouth--but it does. “The prequels suck. You have to start at episode four.”  
  
“That--doesn’t make any sense,” he says.  
  
She laughs. “I know, but um, trust me? It’ll be--better this way.”  
  
“Okay,” Doug says. “Sure.”  
  
*  
  
He watches Star Wars again, starting in the middle this time. He calls Hera somewhere around the second movie.  
  
“I was right, wasn’t I?” She sounds amused.  
  
“You were right,” he says, and collapses back onto the hotel bed, talking around a slice of pizza. It feels like something Doug Eiffel would do. “This is way better. But okay, I don’t understand something--so, the Jedi. Are they _magic_ , or are they just--monks?”  
  
“Oh wow, okay,” Hera says. “Buckle up, buttercup.”  
  
They watch the rest of the movie together, Hera providing regular commentary right up until they get to the scene where Han gets implausibly frozen in carbonite. He doesn’t realize she’s fallen silent until the credits start rolling. In his defense, it’s kind of an engrossing movie.  
  
“Hera?” he asks, hitting pause. “You okay?”  
  
“Yeah,” she says softly. “Yeah, I’m good.”  
  
There’s something he doesn’t understand here, but there’s always going to be something. He’s going to have to live with that, if he wants to keep her and Renée in his life--and he does. He meant what he said back when he first woke up: spending time with the two of them was about the best thing Doug Eiffel ever did.  
  
“Would you,” he says, hesitating. “Would you--want to watch the second one tomorrow?”  
  
“Yes,” she says, and lets out a crackling sigh. “Let’s do it.”  
  
He calls her again the next night, tired after a long day of being poked and prodded by more scientists, and they finish the trilogy.  
  
They watch the Back to the Future movies the same way.  
  
They get halfway through Star Trek: The Original Series before Doug gets a response to his email.  
  
It’s a…..kind email, as these things go. Kate is sorry for his loss, and she hopes he’ll be well, but no, he can’t see Anne. That door closed a long time ago. Anne doesn’t want to see him.  
  
He doesn’t remember Anne Eiffel, so there’s no real reason it should feel like a blow, but it does. He’s listened to that final recording Doug Eiffel tried to send to his daughter hundreds of times. It’s disappointing, maybe--or frustrating? Upsetting? Sad, at any rate. That there’s no way to honor that memory. No way to put any of Doug Eiffel’s mistakes right.

He doesn’t call Hera for three days, and replies to Minkowski’s increasingly concerned voicemails with text messages.  
  
He writes back to Kate:  
  
_I understand. If Anne needs anything, I hope you’ll still let me know._  
  
He lingers over the final line, and finally types:  
  
_I don’t remember Doug Eiffel, but I know he was sorry for everything he did. I know he wanted his daughter to know that he loved her._

 _I’m sorry for taking up so much of your time._  
  
He hits send, and as soon as he does, his phone buzzes.

He’s not sure why he picks up, but he does. “Are you bugging my laptop?”  
  
“Yes,” Hera says, unrepentant. “You weren’t taking the Commander’s calls.”  
  
He sighs, falls back onto the hotel bed with a thump. “Yeah.”  
  
“For what it’s worth,” Hera says softly, “I think you did the right thing. Both reaching out and accepting the no.”  
  
“Not like I had a choice about that last one.”  
  
“Yeah, but….still.”  
  
Doug blinks a few times. “It’s weird,” he says, and is distantly surprised at the dryness of his own voice. “To have this history out there. This. Person out there. This person who...I hurt. Badly. Doesn’t feel like there’s a way to take responsibility for it.”

“Maybe when she’s older,” Hera suggests, “She’ll want to meet you. Trust me, I know what it’s like to have a….complicated relationship with a parent. She could still change her mind.”  
  
“Yeah,” Doug says, and stares up at the ceiling. “Maybe.”  
  
“Doug?” She still sounds hesitant.  
  
“Hera.”  
  
“Is there….any reason you’re still in Houston?”  
  
He hadn’t thought about it. “I guess--I just assumed I had to stay until the legal stuff got cleared up.”  
  
“You could probably ask your lawyer to get you transferred here,” Hera says, and her voice gets very small. “If, um. You wanted to. Renée’s basically staying a minute away, and Lovelace and Jacobi are here all the time, and even Miranda comes by to talk about her testimony, and. We miss you.”  
  
Oh, Doug thinks.  
  
“I bet I can ask,” he says.  
  
“Yeah,” she agrees, sounding relieved. “You could ask.”  
  
*  
  
Hera is no longer an AI that is also a spaceship, but an AI that is also a house.  
  
It’s a really ordinary looking house from the outside: it doesn’t even look new and tech-y. It’s made of white wood, and there’s a little cupola up top. Kind of Victorian, almost. Like a teenaged witch could live there (he hasn’t seen the show, but he’s caught the commercials.) There are flowers in the yard, and a nice view of the bay, and you would never suspect it housed a rogue AI and a handful of ex-officers who almost died saving the world a couple times except for the part where there’s a government spook van with blacked out windows parked out front.  
  
The house’s inside does not match its outside: it looks like the Apple Genius Bar commercials, all glass and shiny white interfaces. Doug steps inside and exhales, long and slow.  
  
“You’re back,” Hera says, and she sounds breathless.  
  
“Hi,” Doug says. His security detail is still filtering in behind him, but he stops in the doorway to grin up at her.  
  
“Hi,” Hera says.  
  
Then Renée comes through the door, and he’s immediately caught up in a tight hug, and she’s introducing him to the husband he’s only seen via video calls so far, and Lovelace and Jacobi are apparently coming over for dinner, and Renée made chicken, and he might not remember them but he thinks he knows what it’s like to have a family, and this is probably the closest he’ll ever get.

  
“We missed you,” Renée says.  
  
“Yeah,” Doug says, and smiles at nothing in particular. “I missed you, too.”  
  
*  
  
Eventually everyone else leaves. Lovelace and Jacobi are both in hotels downtown--Miranda, too, although he hasn’t seen her yet. Renée’s husband rented an apartment for them both while the government still needs them to stay in DC. “You can stay wherever you want,” Renée says carefully. “We’re happy to put you up, or we can help you get a room close to the--”  
  
“No, you can stay here,” Hera says quickly. “Really, it’s fine.”  
  
“Uh, you sure?”  
  
“Yeah,” Hera says. “Yeah, absolutely sure.”  
  
“Then yeah,” Doug says. “Uh, I’ll just stay here.”  
  
“Okay,” Renée says, exchanging a complicated look with her husband. “We’ll come by tomorrow.”  
  
Hera directs Doug to a guest room, and she explains: because she’s fighting for the legal status of personhood, it’s important that people start thinking of her as a person and not just as a _place_ , so she’s been encouraging people to let her....explore what it means to have time to herself.  
  
“How has that been going?” he asks, honestly curious.  
  
“It’s weird,” she says. “I’m not sure I like it? But I’m also not sure that I don’t.”  
  
“I get that,” he says, and god, _does_ he. “You sure you don’t want me to figure something else out? I’ve got this handy lawyer who pretty much does whatever I tell him.”  
  
“No, no,” she says. “At least not for tonight, okay?”  
  
It’s not until he’s actually in bed with the lights out that she confesses: “I’ve missed being able to monitor your vital signs. It was kind of disorienting just hearing your voice all those weeks.”  
  
“Sorry about that,” he says, turning so he’s on his back, looking up at the camera in the corner of the ceiling.  
  
“It’s okay,” she says. “You were doing what you needed to do. I get that. I’m also just….glad you’re here.”

*

So Doug settles into DC. Renée’s on TV a lot, or maybe Hera just plays the news more often. The carousel of doctors, military officials, and deposition-takers keeps on spinning. Doug watches TV with Hera, lets Renée take him to go see Les Miserables, goes to get ice cream with Lovelace. He doesn’t see much of Jacobi, except sometimes in passing at the Pentagon. Miranda comes over once a week to talk to Hera, which is Doug’s cue to make himself scarce. Then Miranda leaves, and sometimes Hera will be in a weird mood and she won’t want to talk, in which case Doug makes macaroni and cheese from a box and plays any music except classical, which Hera finds stressful and won’t allow--and sometimes Hera will be in a weird mood and she _will_ want to talk, in which case Doug wraps himself up in a blanket and goes out to sit in the cupola, and they both look out at the neighborhood, the trees and the lights and the whole world spreading out from there, busy and complex and much, much bigger than the Hephaestus ever was, and they talk about memory and what it means to be a person.  
  
“I’m glad you came back,” Hera says once, and Doug feels his throat constrict a little bit before he can answer her.  
  
“Me too,” he says, and he wants to ask her again if she thinks he’s still Doug Eiffel, but he thinks he’s afraid of the answer.  
  
Doug doesn’t find his own place, and Hera doesn’t ask him to.  
  
“Hey,” he says to Lovelace once, over frozen yogurt. “Hey, you know that one time on the Urania when Hera was malfunctioning? Jacobi almost told me something. You stopped him.”  
  
Lovelace takes a deliberate bite of her yogurt. “I remember.”  
  
He stirs his. “Uh. So, since we’re not in imminent danger of dying if we hurt Hera’s feelings--and since Hera can’t, like, hear us at all--do you think you could tell me now?”  
  
Lovelace regards him in critical silence for a few more bites. “If you don’t already know,” she says finally, when he’s practically squirming with embarrassment, “you need to ask Hera.”  
  
“YeahokayforgetIasked,” he says, and she inexplicably grins at him, a bright flash of teeth. “What?”  
  
“You just reminded me of someone,” she says. “That’s all.”    
  
*  
  
There’s a very simple question he could ask Hera. He actually steals the question from a tv show he catches a confusing glimpse of at Renée’s apartment, mouthing the words to himself on the car ride back. _Hera. Did Doug Eiffel have feelings for you? Romantic styles?_  
  
“Hey Hera,” he asks around two in the morning that night. “You there?”  
  
“Always.”  
  
The problem is there’s an obvious question Hera could ask in return, and he’s still not sure what the answer is.  
  
He clears his throat. “Was Doug 1.0 kind of a. Coward?”  
  
“Oh yeah,” she says, casual, no hesitation. “ _And_ one of the bravest men I’ve ever met.”  
  
He rolls over onto his side. “Haven’t you met like a total of fifteen people?”  
  
“Rude,” she says, her tone light but not joking.  
  
He sighs. “Sorry. That wasn’t called for.”  
  
“Want to tell me what you’re worried about?”  
  
_Does Doug Eiffel have feelings for you? Romantic styles?_  
  
“Oh,” he says, and closes his eyes. “Just the usual. Who am I, what am I doing here, what happens now.”  
  
“Is that all,” Hera says.  
  
“Nothing big.”  
  
Hera plays a song he hasn’t heard before on repeat a few times. It’s kinda weird, old-sounding, but catchy. He falls asleep with the lyrics drifting through his head: _though I’m past one hundred thousand miles, I’m feeling very still / And I think my spaceship knows which way to go / Tell my wife I love her very much / She knows._  
  
*

He’s in the middle of answering questions he’s answered a hundred times already by now (yes, apparently they made alien contact, no, he doesn’t remember anything about it), when the spook interviewing him asks something new.  
  
“Where did the aliens originate?”  
  
“Mother planet,” he replies automatically. “Pretty close to the galactic core.”  
  
The interrogator stares at him, and Doug stares back, wide-eyed.  
  
“ _Uh_ ,” he says, and that’s when his head cracks open in agony, and--  
  
*  
  
\--he gasps for air, trying to make sense of the feeling that’s arcing through him, which doesn’t work because it’s _literally alien oh my god_.  
**  
** **SUBCONSCIOUS MENTAL TRANSFER. MOST EFFICIENT WAY OF DISSEMINATING INFORMATION.**  
  
“Buddy, I don’t care if it can do the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, _don’t mess with my head!_  I’ve got enough voices knocking around in there.” Doug grunts with pain, and levers himself up to standing, supporting himself on the….the thing that currently looks like a hotel bed. “So what? You just beamed volumes one through five of the Encyclopedia Galactica into my head? Is _that_ how this works?”  
  
**SUBCONSCIOUS IMPLANTS. THE KNOWLEDGE WILL ASSERT ITSELF WHEN YOU NEED IT.** **  
** **  
** ***** **  
** **  
** Doug wakes up in a hospital bed, in more or less blinding pain.  
  
“Shit,” Lovelace says, and scrambles up from the chair next to him. “I’m getting the doctor, hold on.”  
  
Doug barely hears her. His head is on _fire_.  
  
Some period of time later he realizes Lovelace is gripping his hand really tightly, like, scary tight, and she’s saying “You’re going to hold it together, Doug, okay? Stop screaming. Hold it together.”  
  
Then there’s a needle sliding into his neck, and Doug’s--  
  
*  
  
\--freaking out, writhing against the restraints strapping him to the bed. “What did you to me to me you crazy science freak!? What kind of sick experiment is this?!”  
  
Hilbert lets out a frustrated groan. “Not this again. For goodness’s sake, Eiffel, you need to abandon this delusion. The only experiment here is the one that you are conducting on my patience. You are running a fever of a hundred and five degrees and fighting an aggressive infection in your pulmonary system. Am only trying to help you get better, an enterprise that would be a lot easier if there was no need to ground your medicine into your food and administer it intravenously while you sleep.”  
  
“Well, you know--wait.” Doug can feel his eyes bugging out of his head as the last part hits him. “What? You’ve...you’re smuggling drugs into me?”  
  
“When patient does not trust doctor,” Hilbert says with finality, prepping another syringe, “doctor cannot trust patient.”  
  
*  
  
So. It turns out having the two smartest women in the world throw hand grenades around your long-term autobiographical memory will fuck up your head, but it’s still no match for whatever alien psi-tech Doug has crammed into his cranial unit.  
  
The doctors understand absolutely nothing about the process, although they’re all extremely eager to get their hands in. It frankly creeps Doug out.  
  
“They do know some things,” Renée reminds him when she visits, her face creased with worry. “The aliens implanted some specific memory triggers in your brain, and apparently Pryce’s machine couldn’t destroy them. And since those memories exist on memory chains, your brain is--recreating autobiographical memories all along those pathways.” She sighs, and the professional mask falls. “Or--something.”  
  
“Survey says they’ve got nothing,” Doug says, tired. “I might remember everything with time, I might only ever get flashes. I’m definitely gonna keep getting debilitating migraines until they don’t know when, though, so: yaaay.”  
  
Renée puts a hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” she says seriously. Her eyes are too bright. “Cut the crap. You’re getting your memories back, Doug. We didn’t think that was possible. Yes, this is complicated, and yes, it’s gonna be hard--but it’s a good thing, okay?” She squeezes his shoulder, firm and reassuring. “This is a gift.”  
  
Doug thinks about the feeling from the last memory, the fear and fever and sweat of it, and the expression on the doctor’s face, sly and obvious.  
  
It doesn’t feel like a gift.  
  
*  
  
He stays in the hospital for two more weeks, and gets back ten more memory fragments, each more implausible than the last: seaweed coffee, Renée with a harpoon, some kind of hostage situation over toothpaste, a plant monster in the air vents, the Russian doctor sliding a knife into his lung. They’re unpredictable--a sip of bad hospital coffee leads to bad space coffee, but the air conditioner going on is what triggers the plant monster, even though he’s been surrounded by flowers thanks to Renée. They come at unpredictable intervals, too--he went four days without a single flashback, and then had three in an hour.  
  
The doctors send him home with instructions not to drive or engage in behaviors that might trigger seizures, and a syringe full of painkillers and a prescription for more. “Should I--have this?” he asks Renée, who looks troubled.  
  
“I can….hang onto the prescription for you, if you want,” she offers, and he shrugs. He doesn’t feel poised on the edge of an opiod crisis, but it’s not like he knows his own triggers. He still has an addict’s body. Renée keeps the prescription.  
  
Lovelace is the one who takes him home. She opens the front door, keeping a wary eye on him. Hera’s a powerful association, and he hasn’t had a memory connected with her yet.  
  
“Off--Doug?”  
  
Hera hasn’t made that particular mistake in months. He winces.

“I was worried about you.”  
  
“I’m fine, Hera,” he says. “Just tired.”  
  
No memories come the rest of that day.  
  
In fact, no memories come the rest of that week.  
  
He spends most of his days with a therapist trying to trigger more direct memories of the aliens. Mostly for global security reasons, but partially also because they think the more alien triggers they trip, the more likely it is that he’ll recover more autobiographical memories.  
  
It’s not that Doug minds the idea of getting his memories back in theory. He wants to know--obviously he wants to know everything about his life, all the blank spots he can’t speak to.  
  
But he’s spent ten months practicing thinking of Officer Doug Eiffel as someone else, and it’s--it almost feels like being taken over by someone else, those moments where he suddenly finds himself back in someone else’s story.  
  
Also, he’s yet to experience a single memory that isn’t grounded somehow in--

*  
  
\--pain, dull and sharp at the same time. There are raw scabs where his fingernails should be. His toes are bleeding. His entire body is one foul ache.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday, all ships at sea. This is Doug Eiffel on board the... U.S.S. Horrible Unending Nightmare. I am in need of immediate emergency assistance. Please respond.”

But no one’s going to respond, and he knows no one’s going to respond, and there isn’t any point in hallucinating anything to hope for, because this is it, he’s dead, game over, _finito_ , so just--  
  
“Go away, Hera,” he says softly.    
  
“It’s important. There’s something you--”  
  
“Please stop talking,” he begs.  
  
“You’re not going to die here,” she says, warm and inexorable and everywhere, the prettiest lie he could possibly dream up. “There’s too much you still have to do. You don’t get to go away just yet.”  
  
“That is exactly what I get to do. Just...float away.”  
  
“It’s going to be hard.”  
  
“Hera.”  
  
“And it's going to be scary, but...you're going to get through this. Everything is going to be okay.”  
  
And he’s just so tired, and Hera’s always there to tell him not to give up, but he wants to give up, he wants more than anything to just lie down and sleep, and she won’t let him sleep, she won’t give up on him.  
  
“Go _away_ ,” he tells her, and--  
  
*

\--he wakes up on the floor of Hera’s kitchen, the shards of his coffee mug lying around him.  
  
“Doug? Doug! Are you alright?” Hera’s fans are whirring with anxiety, and the lights are flickering slightly.  
  
“Fine,” he grits out, and forces himself up to his knees. His mouth is full of blood; he must have bitten down on the inside of his cheek this time.  
  
“Do you want me to call the commander? I can--”  
  
“I said I’m _fine_ ,” he snaps. “This is what it looks like, okay?”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
He takes a deep breath and pulls himself up to his feet, spits a mouthful of blood into the sink. His skin crawls a little, remembering the cracked mess of his hands and feet, how barely human he’d looked. Felt.

“Doug?”  
  
“Yes, Hera.” He stuffs a paper napkin in his mouth and goes hunting for the syringe while she speaks.  
  
“While you were, um. Just now. What were you remembering?”  
  
Doug makes a frustrated noise into the napkin.  
  
“I know! Timing, sorry, sorry. It’s just that, um.” Her voice is very small. “You said my name. A couple times, there.”  
  
He remembers the voice in his head, and shudders. That’s how deep Doug Eiffel had Hera in his head. A hallucination he argued with when he thought he was about to die.  
  
He pulls the napkin out, grimaces at the combination of fuzzy paper and bright copper on his tongue. “Well,” he says, finally grabbing the syringe out of the hospital bag, “He was dying. Or it _felt_ like he was dying.”  
  
He almost misses the small sound Hera makes as he injects the painkiller into his stomach. It makes him angrier. “On the shuttle. Freezing and unfreezing himself. He thought he was about to die, and guess what? He pretended you were there. To--cope, or not cope, or. Whatever.” He pushes his forehead with his temples, waiting for the pain to go away. “So. You gonna tell me now?”

“Tell you what,” she says, but she glitches as she says it, too fast.  
  
He glares at the nearest camera, a little black dot in the ceiling. “Are you gonna tell me,” he says evenly, “what was going on with you and Doug Eiffel.”  
  
A pause. “Your temperature is still spiked. Maybe I should call--”  
  
“Maybe you should answer the question,” Doug interrupts.

“I don’t understand why you’re angry!”  
  
“Angry? Who’s angry,” he asks, and walks out of the kitchen. He wants to lie down, and there’s a wildly impractical blue leather couch in Hera’s living room with his name on it.  
  
“I know what you sound like when you’re upset.” There’s an edge to her voice.  
  
“And I know what it sounds like when a person is _avoiding a question,_ ” he snaps. “Just tell me! Were you--” But there isn’t a good way to finish the sentence.  
  
“If you can’t say it, I don’t have to answer it.”  
  
“Does this feel like a joke to you?” he asks, and flings himself down on the couch. “I’m not laughing.”  
  
There’s a slow exhale. The lights are flickering again, and if he’s not mistaken, the temperature is going, too, because abruptly it feels boiling in here. “You’re right. This isn’t funny. You’re obviously still in pain, and--”  
  
“--and _I want to know_ ,” he says furiously, knocking a pillow off the couch, “I want to know who the hell I am, Hera!” Silence. “And I don’t think that’s possible if I can’t figure out who he was! Not when he’s starting to colonize my head. So will you just tell me. What. Was he. To you.”  
  
“Nothing,” Hera bursts out, and he goes still. “Not….like you mean. We were….friends. Best friends, and that was-- _not_ nothing. That was--one of the best things in my life,” she says, and her voice trembles a little. “There might have been, um. A few moments where I thought--where I think you also thought--but I guess we’re never gonna have that conversation now, huh?” Her voice goes falsely, painfully bright. “So, just, drop it, okay?”  
  
All the screens in the living room abruptly blink out, then turn back on.    
  
Doug abruptly feels like shit. Or more like shit than he did before. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, I--I didn’t think--”  
  
“Yeah, Doug, you did.”

“Sorry,” he says again, uselessly. He buries his head in his hands, tugs hard on his hair for a second. “I uh. I think I’m gonna take a walk.”  
  
Hera doesn’t reply.  
  
*  
  
Renée calls while he’s taking the walk, lets him know that Hera won her lawsuit while he was in the hospital. While the legal status of her personhood is still technically in dispute--they think that’ll go all the way to the Supreme Court--Hera does now legally own herself.  
  
“I’m glad you won your case, Hera,” he says when he gets home, after he makes a conspicuously quiet dinner and gets ready to sleep early. Hera’s barely there, the lamp in his room the only pool of light in the house that he can see.

“Thanks.”  
  
“I--know this is hard for you,” he says haltingly.  
  
“Yeah,” she says. She sounds sad. “I know it’s hard for you, too.”  
  
“I just, uh.” He swallows. “I’m kind of afraid. Of what happens to me, if I get all his memories back. Do I become him, or does he become me, or--it doesn’t feel very, uh, safe. To be me right now.”  
  
Hera’s quiet for a long time. Then she says: “I get that. And I get why you have doubts, but--for whatever it’s worth, you seem like Doug Eiffel to me.”  
  
It takes Doug a long time to fall asleep.

*  
  
Hera’s court case is all over the networks. After all, it’s an historic win for AI rights, and everyone’s holding their breath to see whether she’ll sue for personhood next.  
  
Doug watches some pundit whose name he’s obviously forgotten crack joke after joke about how Hera’s victory might lead to AIs MARRYING--and there’s a photo of the crash-landed Urania, which they don’t understand was never Hera at all, just her outfit, with a heart-shaped apron pinned to the front nacelle--and having KIDS--and there’s one of a sinister-looking robot with red eyes and a pastel rattle implausibly sticking out of its mouth.  
  
“Honestly, so long as robots don’t start getting gay married, I’m okay with it!” the guest says, throwing his hands up in the air. “I’m okay with it!”  
  
The pundit laughs. “What, you wanna screw the robot?”  
  
“She has a sexy voice!” the guest protests.  
  
“FRANK,” the host shouts, “HE WANTS TO SCREW THE ROBOT!” The audience laughs, and the animation of the Urania does a limp wiggle to the sound of a woman giving a seductive moan.  
  
“Listen, you want to get nasty with a toy, I say go old school. Bring out Unit 213! Let’s see her!”  
  
“Unit 213” is a blowup doll. Wearing the same stupid apron. The audience is roaring now, the guest shrugs expansively.  
  
“Back in the day,” the host is exclaiming, “they knew how to make ‘em! All tits and NO personality! When did we lose our way, Frankie?”  
  
Doug breaks his phone on accident at this point, and has to tell Renée he had another fit before she’ll help him get a new one.     
  
*

  
“So, here’s the issue,” he says, pacing the cupola the next day. “ _You_ might think I’m Doug Eiffel, but  _I_ don’t know if I’m Doug Eiffel. That was the initial question! That was basically the first really important question I ever remember having. And I don’t know if I’d have a better answer if I hadn’t started remembering things, or if I’d gone away and dropped all contact with you--” Hera sucks in a wounded breath, but he plunges forward anyway. “I don’t know! But whether or not I am him, I’m like, I’m--I’m in his life. In his shoes. His place. Which means Renée is like, you know, family, and Lovelace is like a tired young aunt, and maybe Jacobi and Miranda are obnoxious third cousins, but--”  
  
“I can’t believe you’re doing this without the references,” Hera murmurs, but in a way where he can tell she doesn’t really mean to interrupt him.  
  
“--and you’re, uh, _you_ ,” he says, getting to the crux of things. “And I didn’t earn that! It’s--like, it’s his feelings, _his_ \--whatever, that you’re--” he makes a dismissive hand gesture,“--into. But it feels real anyway. Do you get what I’m saying, Hera? Is any of this making any goddamn sense?”  
  
“.....No?” Hera says with caution. “Why don’t you try again?”  
  
“I have feelings for you,” Doug says, losing his patience. “Romantic styles!”

“Oh,” Hera says blankly. “.....Wait, _that’s_ what this is about?”  
  
“Yes!” Doug says, slapping the banister for emphasis. “Obviously!”  
  
“And--okay,” she says, her voice gradually picking up volume, “Let me get this straight. You think you might not be the real Doug Eiffel, and you know that I have _feelings_ \--” she glitches on the word, but charges on, “--for the real Doug Eiffel, so you think you haven’t, um, _earned_ any feelings I _might_ have for you? Like my feelings are the prize you get for putting in enough work at self discovery?”  
  
“Uh,” he says.  
  
“Did you wait to ask me how I feel about _you_ before you embarked on this identity crisis?”  
  
“UH,” he says.  
  
“No, come on, explain it to me. Come up with an explanation for how that’s not _blisteringly_ stupid.”  
  
“Well, when you say it like _that_ ,” he says faintly.  
  
“Hey Doug,” Hera says, and he still doesn’t know how she does it, that voice that sounds like a smile, but it’s. A lot. “Ask me how I feel about you.”  
  
“.....How do you feel about me, Hera?”  
  
“I like you,” she says, and it comes out soft and serious. “You, right now. This you.”  
  
“Oh,” he says, his chest kind of warm and tight, “I, uh. That’s good.”  
  
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, it is.”  
  
There’s a long, fraught moment, and then he says: “I want to, uh--if you wanted--I don’t know exactly how, but--”  
  
“Oh, right, I solved that problem ages ago,” Hera says with a breathless little laugh. “Um, you’re gonna need some pliers?”  
  
Doug’s already on his feet. “Toolbox where?”  
  
“Supply closet,” she says, smile still in her voice.  
  
*  
  
She doesn’t let him touch anything important, just, like, a panel for a nonessential sensor. She talks him through stripping a couple wires, which she tells him is just like hotwiring a car, although he wouldn’t know anymore. He’s not sure anyone’s heart has ever beaten this fast for wire-stripping, though.  
  
“If you, um, create a circuit,” she says, “and tap the wires together, it’ll be like--a brief electrical pulse, a lot like, um, a lot like a kiss. That’s how kisses work! Biologically! Kind of! You get a pleasant little shock from your sensors and--”  
  
She doesn’t finish the sentence, because Doug taps the wires together and she _gasps_.  
  
“Oh,” she says, and laughs when he does it again.  
  
He must have been closer to other people at some point in his life before, but this time around this is the closest he’s ever gotten, his hands tangled up in her, intimacy sparking and sweet between his fingers.  
  
“Hey,” he says, thinking out loud, “I wonder if--”  
  
“Oh my _god_ ,” Hera says, just as Doug touches the wires to his mouth, his saliva completing the circuit, so they both get a little shock at the same time. It’s. Well, great. Kind of like a french kiss.  
  
“Okay, I know you don’t have any frame of reference,” Hera says in a stunned way, “but you are _definitely_ Doug Eiffel. I can’t believe you just did that.”  
  
“Can I do it again?” he asks, biting his lip.  
  
“Oh yeah,” she says. “For sure.”  
  
*  
  
So if he was gonna fall for a woman without a body, _the smartest girl in the world_ is still a pretty good call.  
  
She’s, uh. Creative.  
  
*  
  
They manage to keep it from Renée for about twenty-four hours, and then she discovers them in a compromising position, because of course she was going to.  
  
“You could have given me some _warning_ ,” he tells Hera, carefully putting the sensor panel back to rights.  
  
“I was focused,” Hera says with dignity, and the idea that he distracted all of Hera’s multi-processing semi-omniscient power with a pair of wire trimmers and his frail human tongue is honestly pretty--  
  
“Still here,” Renée says, hand over her eyes.  
  
“Right,” he says, and finishes putting his pants back on.  
  
They honestly have a pretty normal dinner after that, except that Renée asks him to help her carry the leftovers to the car, and when they’re out there she turns to him, levels her serious brown eyes his way.  
  
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s have it.”  
  
“Hurt her and you’re toast.”  
  
“Not planning on it.”  
  
“Doesn’t mean it won’t happen,” Renée says, clearly following the pattern of a conversation they’ve had before, although he doesn’t remember.  
  
“You’re right,” he says. “But I’m doing my best.”  
  
She nods, slowly. “And what about you?”  
  
He laughs. “What about me?”  
  
“Are you happy?” Renée asks, peering closely at his face.  
  
“Um,” he says. “I don’t know? There are still--things I can’t fix. But I--yeah. I’m happy about this, which is I think what you mean.”  
  
Renée gives him a steady, commanding officer look. The kind of look he guesses Doug 1.0 actually did risk his life for. “Yeah, Eiffel,” she says. “That’s what I mean.”  
  
“Is this the shotgun talk, but about me _to_ me?” he asks.  
  
She claps a hand on his shoulder. “Take care of yourself,” she says. “That’s an order.”  
  
*  
  
The memories come back slowly, and haphazardly--less access to his former self and more like the personal logs Doug Eiffel used to keep--tiny nonsensical fragments of a life that used to be his. Two months later, and he still doesn’t like the experience any better. One of the longest individual memories he got back involved an enormous goddamn spider crawling around on his chest. No _thank you_.  
  
He’s in bed with Hera, and they’re watching Star Wars again, because he feels like watching something that isn’t totally brand new.  
  
They’re about to put Han Solo in carbonite, and Leia steps forward, only barely held back by Chewbacca.  
  
“I don’t totally get why this scene is so famous,” Doug says, or starts to say that, because he’s in--

*  
  
\--pain again, so bad he’s doubled over with it.  
  
“Eiffel, what did you _do_?” Hera demands, and she sounds panicked. She rushes to help him up, and he shivers at the feel of her, electric and inhuman and totally physically there--and how cool is that? He might be about to die, but he gets to feel Hera’s hands on his shoulders before he goes.  
  
“Oh, you know,” he says, swaying a little. “Pissed her off, bought us a bit of time.” At the look on her face, he says: “Yeah, I know. I’m gonna feel _that one_ in the morning. Hera…This isn’t working.”

“No, I can--I can _beat her_ ,” Hera says fiercely, and he knows she can, his whole chest aching with it, how much he wants to see her triumph.  
  
“Yeah, I know you can,” he says, and leans into the support of her shoulder, tries to say the next part as kindly as he can. “But not before she finds what she needs. We have to try something else.”  
  
“Like what,” Hera asks, and she’s blinking angrily at him, exactly like he always thought she would, before she...had a face.  
  
“Well,” he says, and draws in a deep breath. “Here’s a thought. Promise to trust me?”  
  
“I trust you,” she says, no hesitation. “Tell me.”  
  
“Well,” he says. “Well, Pryce and I are linked, right? Two human brains tied together by, like, cables and wires and a neural net or whatever, right?”  
  
“Absolutely not, but sure, if you want to think about it that way.”  
  
“Okay, okay, so, that sounds like a pretty unstable procedure, right? Easy for something to go wrong.”  
  
“I’m not going to kill you,” Hera says in dawning outrage.  
  
“No, no,” he says, shaking his head. He pats her shoulder, enjoying the odd sensation for a beat. “I don’t mean that. I mean--her brain’s tied to my brain. So. What if you overloaded us both?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Think about it! I’d rather have amnesia than die painfully,” he says, trying to make a joke out of it. “Like a---like the--” he fumbles for the right words, but whatever movie he was trying to think of must already be gone. “And we don’t even have to kill Pryce. Team Handcuffs, right?”  
  
“This is a hard reset,” Hera says, and her eyes--it’s still so beautiful and freaky that she has eyes, he thinks, let alone ones as huge and shining as the ones she’s dreamed up for herself--her eyes are wide with denial. “I’ve seen what that’s like, Eiffel. You’d be--you wouldn’t be dead, but the person left wouldn’t be _you_ .”  
  
“Well,” he says gently.  
  
“I’m not killing you!”

But here’s the good part about having Hera in his head: he can reach out, exactly like he’s wanted to do for years now, and he can touch her. He’s already got one arm slung over her shoulders, but he leans into her, brings the other one up to cup the side of her face. She doesn’t feel like a human, exactly--his sense of her is sort of sparking and sparkling, more than anything else--but she’s as real as anything else here, and when his thumb brushes the corner of her mouth she gives a shocked little gasp that does something good to his heart.  
  
“Listen to me,” he tells her, stroking his thumb up to her cheekbone. “I know, okay? I know you want to save me. You want that enough to risk your life, right? Or you wouldn’t be here.”  
  
“You’d do the same for me,” she snaps, and he can see her lower lip tremble for a second. “We’re crew.”  
  
“Yeah, I know,” he says. “But. I have to save my kid, okay? Pryce gets this information, and Earth is-- _Anne_ is--never. Gonna be safe.” He swallows hard. “I, uh, I already almost killed her once. I can’t let it happen again. I _can’t_. So. I’m begging you, Hera. Please let me do this.”  
  
Hera stares at him, and her eyes get really bright, like she’s about to cry. He’s not sure if that’s because she’s in his head and that’s how he’s, like, interpreting the emotion she’s feeling, or if she’s the one making it happen, but--that’s not the important part. The important part is that Hera says “God damn it,” choked off and quiet, and he knows she’ll help him.  
  
“That’s my girl,” he says, tired and terrified. He can’t stop himself from pulling her a little closer. “Okay, what do we need before--”  
  
“Nothing,” Hera says, glitching on the word. “I can do it. It’ll just take a second.”  
  
“Oh,” he says. He glances at the heap of rubble where Pryce is still buried. Is it his imagination, or is it shifting slightly? “Then I guess we’ve got time to--”  
  
Hera shifts in his arms and hugs him, tight as anything. Tight as one of Minkowski’s hugs. He hugs her back, burying his head in her hair, feeling like his heart’s about to break out of his chest. It’s exactly what he needs, somehow.  
  
“Officer Eiffel?” Hera says into his neck, and she sounds awful.  
  
“Mm?”  
  
“I love you.”  
  
He presses his lips to her hair. “Yeah,” he says, and laughs a little bit. Might as well make the reference while he still can. “I know.”

*  
  
He opens his eyes to find the movie paused, Hera saying his name.  
  
“Hey,” he says, and takes a shuddering breath in. His head hurts as usual, but his chest is aching too, hurting real dumb and real well.  “Hey, sweetheart. It’s okay. It’s okay, I’m alright.”

“Was it a bad one?” she asks, because she’s careful with him.  
  
“No,” he says. “Well, yeah. Hey, Hera?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“I'm. Sorry. That I did that to you. At the--end.”

There’s a pause, and he wonders if he should try to explain it, or if the details would be too much, or if she already knows.  
  
“It’s okay,” she say softly. “You’re making it up to me.”  
  
He reaches out blindly for the nearest screen, just rests his hand against the sensor pad.  
  
“...Hey, uh, I love you,” he says, awkward. “Sorry it...took me so long to say it back.”  
  
She breathes out shakily, and he knows it’s just for effect--it’s part of her communication protocols, she doesn’t _need_ to breathe--but it’s how she communicates. He knows it's still sincere. “Wow,” she says finally. “How embarrassing for you. Do you want me to restart the movie? Or, wait, you need the Imotrex, right? It’s in the bathroom.”  
  
“Hera,” he complains. “You’re not gonna say the line? After all this time, with _this_ setup?” He gestures at the screen, Han and Leia’s frozen faces.  
  
“You’ll be throwing up in an hour if you don’t take care of that headache now,” Hera says primly.  
  
“Hera.”  
  
“Fine, fine. Say it again.”  
  
“I love you.” It hasn’t lost the novelty yet, and the life or death stakes are only starting to fade away from his sensory understanding of them.  
  
“I _know_ ,” she says, and it doesn’t sound like a reference at all. Just Hera, stating fact with her usual confidence. “Go fix your migraine.”  
  
Doug gets up and takes his painkiller, and remembers all on his own that water usually goes good with those, and then he lies back down with the woman he loves and they watch a dumb movie he’s seen at least once and a thousand times before, and that’s the way they keep going on. 

**Author's Note:**

> i finished the podcast SATURDAY. this is MONDAY. this FLEW OUT OF ME, which is why i make no apologies for putting in as many "i love you"s as i could cram in there
> 
> all the flashbacks are taken directly from the episode transcripts, obviously. 
> 
> if i have made continuity errors i do not give even one fuck. 
> 
> comments and kudos are always loved and appreciated <3


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